Message by Larry Thacker Jr from March 2, “A Letter to Remember”
In this electronic age, fewer of us are getting actual letters, but most of us are still old enough to have one or more that we treasure. Maybe they came from someone we love. Maybe they represent a milestone achievement in our lives, or maybe they simply make record of something we need for legal purposes.
I don’t have a lot of printed letters, but I do have some birthday cards sent by my parents over the years with some meaningful things written in them. My beloved wife and I are firmly planted in the shadow of the shining screen. She may have some things I made for her over the years because I thought they would be meaningful to her, but my record of romance lives in an Outlook folder.
Letters have played a significant roll in history. The letters from our country’s founders help us to understand what they intended. We have probably all learned in school about Martin Luther King’s letter from the Birmingham jail, a powerful defense of nonviolent resistance to racial segregation.
But there is one collection of letters that have truly changed the world. Some were written to individuals, others to churches, and others to people in a certain region. We have them in our Bibles. I doubt that any of the writers suspected that two thousand years later we would still be intently studying their correspondence, but God knew.
Arguably most significant among these is Paul’s letter to the believers in Rome. I have often said that if I could share only part of the Bible, I would want to include two books in particular. I would choose the gospel of Jon because it so clearly shows us who Jesus is. I would choose the letter to the Romans because it explains why that matters and what to do about it.
So, with this message, I invite you to join me on a journey through this remarkable book. Honestly I’m a little intimidated by the proposition that I should lead you on this journey. People far more learned than I cannot agree on everything in it, and there is so much! Yet I am drawn to the challenge, and I trust that His Holy Spirit will guide us all as we go.
We begin with just the first seven verses of Chapter 1. Paul wastes no ink as he begins right away to lay the foundation for his letter. It is quite a greeting, and from it we can begin to unpack some of the themes he will expound in the rest of the text.
